Fix “Unable to do quality & policy checks on product pages” in Merchant Center
Typical Merchant Center message: Unable to do quality & policy checks on product pages
Reviewed October 14, 2026 against Google’s published rules.
Google reports this when a landing page submitted through the link or link template attribute cannot be accessed, because robots.txt blocks Google’s crawler from downloading the page or its image.
A grace period
Google says that after a robots.txt update, products get a grace period of up to 30 days in which they keep showing with their previously approved images.
How to fix it
- Update robots.txt so Googlebot and Googlebot-Image can crawl your full site. Google’s example allows both with an empty Disallow rule for each. In Shopify, robots.txt is generated from a robots.txt.liquid template. If you or an app customized it, look for rules that block Googlebot or Googlebot-Image.
- Test the setup with the URL Inspection tool.
- Open Products, then Needs attention, and filter for this issue. Update any product link to a URL Google can access.
- For many products, download the .csv list, check that each link leads to a valid mobile landing page, and re-upload the corrected data.
- Google says it can take 24–72 hours for a fix to leave the Needs attention list.
Check your own catalog for these issues
FeedGuard’s live check shows pages and images that do not open. It does not read robots.txt, so check that file yourself.
Google’s requirement: support.google.com/merchants/answer/6098154. FeedGuard checks your data against published rules; Google makes the final approval decision.
Independent guidance. Google’s current documentation and decisions control. FeedGuard is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google or Shopify, and this guide is not an official Google Help Center page.